Jobs and Unemployment

Inside Jobs and Unemployment

EPI’s thorough research in this area is as critical as ever and focuses on understanding the intricacies and impact of the slow recovery in the U.S. labor market, including our persistent high unemployment, near-record long-term unemployment, mass underemployment, and weak labor force participation.

EPI in the media

Missouri and Illinois had among the highest rates of black unemployment in 2014, according to a new study by the Economic Policy Institute. Missouri’s rise of 3.2 percentage points in black unemployment from 2013 to 2014 year was the second highest among the states, according to the study by EPI economist Valerie Wilson, which was released Thursday. Black unemployment fell in most states in 2014, according to the study, but spiked up in Wisconsin and Missouri.

A new report on unemployment trends by the Economic Policy Institute has some sobering findings on the varying unemployment trajectories that different racial groups experienced between 2013 and 2014, and what we can expect to see this year. According to the report, in 2014 the white unemployment rate across the United States was 4.9%. But the black unemployment rate was more than double that, at 11.4%. The GIF below breaks down the disparities between white and black unemployment by state in 2014. (The sample size for unemployment broken down by race wasn’t big enough for every state; this chart includes 32 states and the District of Columbia.) You can see that black unemployment dwarfs white unemployment across the country:

The unemployment rate for black people was 11 percent in the fourth quarter of last year and was 10.4 percent in February. Both rates are still higher than the peak the national unemployment rate reached at the worst point of the recession — 9.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute.

In Wisconsin, the state with the highest annual African-American unemployment rate, nearly 1 in 5 black people are unemployed. The states with the next highest rates of black unemployment were Nevada (16.1 percent) and Michigan (15.8 percent), according to a new analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data released by the Economic Policy Institute on Thursday. The issue brief is a sobering reminder that black Americans continue to face troublingly high unemployment rates.

Unemployment among African-Americans in Wisconsin last year was the highest of any of the 50 states, according to a study released Thursday by the center-left Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. At 19.9% — or 1 in 5 working-age people — the black unemployment rate in Wisconsin is nearly three times higher than the highest state white unemployment rate (7% in Nevada) and significantly higher than the national black unemployment rate of 11%, the think tank found.

Milwaukee is merely the extreme of a national trend, according to Valerie Wilson, the author of the report. “Five years into recovery from the Great Recession, unemployment rates are finally nearing their 2007 levels, but the pace of recovery varies by state for different racial and ethnic groups,” wrote Wilson, who directs the Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy at the Economic Policy Institute.